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Detox? Do it for your life

Get your year off to a perfect start with these easy strategies for removing irritants and toxins from your life.

By Docs You The

Fri., Jan. 1, 2010

Get your year off to a perfect start with these easy strategies for removing irritants and toxins from your life.

Your bathroom: Use a water purifier, not only for drinking water but also for your shower. Chlorine can dry out your hair and skin.

Your/her closet: High heels are a woman's most destructive piece of clothing. Yes, you should buy more shoes! This time, look for a big toe box and heels less than two inches high. Try shoes on in the late afternoon, and test at least five pairs.

Your air: Get a kit to test for radon in your house, and replace your air filters to make sure you're breathing the best air you can get.

Your mind: Spend five minutes in private humming "yummmm." This will help you clear your mind, de-stress and start thinking of what's important in life.

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Your body: Lessening the load on your liver doesn't require fasting or a crazy regimen. It just means choosing unrefined, unprocessed foods over those that spend more time in a factory than in the earth

IS IT TALENT OR TRAINING? Whether you can do long division in your head or be a virtuoso violinist can't just be chalked up to genius you're born with. Scientists are increasingly seeing that what you were exposed to as a child affects whether your "natural" talents are accentuated or diminished.

When you developed as a baby, neurons, the nerve cells of the brain, were created at the rate of 500,000 per minute to reach the end result of about 100 billion neurons per baby. But the sheer number of brain cells isn't the key to your talents; establishing and reinforcing connections between those cells is.

Early experiences, such as being exposed to both English and Chinese as an infant, lay down neural circuits that are customized to you. The more frequently an experience is repeated, the stronger these circuits grow. The reverse is also true. If the brain has no reason to make connections for, say, Chinese language, it will eventually prune away the branches capable of such learning. Yes, you can learn another language or learn to play the piano when you're older, but it's much more difficult.

FOR THE BOYS: Prostate is the most common cancer in guys and a very small lifestyle change may help you fly under its radar: daily walking.

Men who regularly exercise at a moderate level (brisk walking counts) are more likely than sedentary men to have biopsies that indicate no cancer. Walking a few hours a week at a moderate pace helps curb risk, but the more effort you make, the less chance of cancer.

Even men who do get prostate cancer are less likely to have an aggressive form if they are exercisers. Working out may help lower levels of testosterone and other hormones suspected to spur the growth of prostate tumours, and it turns off genes that make a protein that fosters prostate cancer cell growth.

NO PAIN ... NO PAIN! There's a way to make your workout feel easier. Ask someone along, and you might not even notice you're going strong but feeling it less.

A study of university crew-team members found that when they did indoor rowing workouts in synchrony, their pain thresholds were higher than when they did a similarly tough workout alone. The theory is that synchronized activity somehow makes you produce more of the feel-good chemicals (endorphins) responsible for letting you do more with less perceived exhaustion. These same chemicals also may give you a "heightened sense of social bonding," according to the researchers.

Want to get active, but can't find anyone who's available? At least take your iPod with you. When researchers stacked up music and silence, they found that people worked out to music 11 per cent longer without feeling like they were working harder. We also know we can work harder on machines when watching a program we like.

But we still say the best buddies aren't electronic. Even if your workout partner can't join you, be sure to call her afterward and tell her what she missed. She will do the same for you

No MP3 player can give you quite the motivation (or support) your buddies can.

The You Docs, Mike Roizen and Mehmet Oz, are authors of YOU: Having A Baby. Send questions to the doctors on their website, realage.com.

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